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Hello everyone,

Being a Ubuntu novice, I have been following the step-by-step instructions and got my new UBUNTU 12.04LTS headless server up and running.
Installed and running Putty, VNC, WEBMin - also without problems.

Halt point: virtualisation
My first noobish idea was to start one VM with W7 and MediaPortal , so I could scavange my old server (MediaPortal @ W7, sharing DTV and media with 4 Win-PC clients in the house, but I constantly have stability issues on both clients and server side) and would buy me some time @wife&kids.
Then on a second VM I would install the proper Ubuntu media server (following this guide).

Problem: is it possible to distribute access to the PCI-e DVB-T and PCI DVB-S cards which I plan to have in my setup across multiple or at least 1 VM?
If I understood correctly, Ian, You run your media server in a VM, using KVM (software based), also sharing DTV.
How did You get the VM's to "see" and get access to DVB card(s)?

P.S.
Dual tuner DVB-T card TBS 6280 ordered, ETA: 2-3 weeks.
Technisat Skystar 2 HD PCI installed.

Hi there Neno and welcome to the forums

The short answer to your question is it will either work fine or not work at all depending on whether your motherboard supports it. Your best bet is to google for "ubuntu kvm pci passthrough" or similar and have a nose around.

I've changed the way I run things on my server since I put together the guides. Apart from a couple of Windows VMs I run the bulk of the server stuff on the host instance now and use Ubuntu VMs for playing/testing. I test stuff out using a scratch VM and once I'm happy it's working nicely I repeat the steps on the main host. And when for example I'm testing a new release of Ubuntu I'll build a complete "server" on a VM. Once I'm happy I'd then upgrade the main host.

Hope this helps.

Ian.